Bernard Conway

Set in the fictional universe of Ultima Online, an aging and miserable brigand soon finds his fortunes reversed. PDF

Consider these two descriptions of dark places beyond reality. The first comes from Haruki Murakami ’s Dance Dance Dance. An unnamed narrator feels drawn to a rundown hotel at which he had strange experience several years prior. But upon arrival, he discovers that the hotel has been totally revamped into a swanky, modern place and all traces of its past have been covered. As he pokes around, he learns that a current employee has also had a bizarre experience inside the hotel since its remodeling. The elevator she was using brought her to a strange hallway and then disappeared. As she describes it, But the whole place was completely dark. All I could see were the elevator call buttons and the red digital display that says what floor it’s on. So the first thing I did was press the call buttons, but the elevator kept going down. I didn’t know what to do. Then, for some reason, I decided to take a look around.       There was no sound at all. And the floor felt f...

Here he comes. Up through Austin. Down from Portland. He’s stopping in Boulder, with many more Colorado destinations in mind. He’s traveling west for a little artist colony outside of Joshua Tree, then east for Asheville. He’s the King Midas of Cool. And everything he touches turns to gold. He’s driving an old van that he fixed up for the nomad life. Sometimes he parks it out on the street in San Francisco, alongside all the teachersand city service workers rendered homeless by tech crowd’s land grabs . Doing so bumps one of them out of place. But it’s cool, he says. Life is better with less. It’s what the hippies would have wanted. Besides, it’s all going to be automated anyways. He drives out into the mountains on the weekends for a little R&R. He knows where all the good climbing spots are. Except they don’t stay good for long. He touches the rocks and they turn to gold. And for one brief moment, it’s an experience unlike anything you’ve ever seen. But it’s all over af...

  “Can’t you see the game is crooked?      Yeah, but it’s the only game in town .” -Canada Bill Jones There is an odd pattern that seems to emerge in every introduction to the philosophy presented in Plato’s Republic . It goes something like this: 1)  A description of how Plato’s perfect society would be overseen by an elite caste of Guardians, who are selected only after being subjected to exhaustive trials of character and judgement. 2)  An explanation that, above the Guardians, is the Philosopher King, who endures even more grueling trials, and who rules not by his own whims, but by an intimate knowledge of the Forms , particularly the form of good. 3)  An explanation of the Forms, the idea that a perfect version of a given object exists on a removed plane, and of which dense matter can only imitate. Usually, something like an animal is given as an example. Out there, on the plane of the forms, is the perfect and eternal ...

Jacks prowls the night streets working as a hitman. He feeds his victims to a flesh eating monster kept out in the mountains. But after being stung by a sense of resentment, he begins to plot against his employers. PDF 

The Glass Bees , by Ernst Junger , was originally written in 1957 but was dismissed for lacking any particularly deep insight into its time. Five decades later, it appears the novel was much more prophetic than it originally seemed. The plot takes place primarily in the mind of its protagonist, Captain Richard, as he agonizes over the possibility taking a job as a security officer for an infamous tech company. Zapparoni, the company’s head, has made a fortune in the creation of automatons. Most eminently are his glass bees which function as a prototype of drone swarm technology . What is perhaps most outstanding, however, is Junger’s ability not only to foresee what was to come, but look even beyond that: My query is this: why are those who have endangered and changed our lives in such terrible and unpredictable ways not content with unleashing and controlling enormous forces and with enjoying their consequent fame, power, and wealth? Why must they want to be saints as well? ...

This post contains spoilers for the series Altered Carbon and the drama Faust . "I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.” - Faust , Johan Wolfgang Von Goethe “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” -Robert J. Oppenheimer, quoting the Bhagavad Gita while speaking of the atomic bomb   “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” -Robert Burns RECAP In the first post of this series, we looked at the Luciferian Myth, mostly through the lens of John Milton’s poem, Paradise Lost . The poem provides a nuanced origin story for the conflict between good and evil. Motivated by a vain sense that it was he who was meant to be in control, Satan rebelled against God, but failed. Evil then proceeds from his ongoing attempts to recover his exalted state. In Part II, we observed these archetypes playing out in a number of sci-fi films where human civilization is upended. In these films, however, it came to light t...

Myths became images and shadows of higher ideas, and by their mysterious character inculcated a profounder veneration. -Plutarch In the last post, we looked at of myth of Satan’s fall in order to articulate its unique characteristics. To restate: Satan is thrown out of heaven for insubordination. In Hell, he has a chance to make due. Instead, he feels compelled to continue seeking power, or at the very least, vengeance. This moves the myth beyond a simple schematic of good versus evil. But as the myth transforms into a more relatable form—incorporating universal themes of human drama—it becomes more difficult to recognize the underlying symbols.    We saw this in John Milton’s Paradise Lost . In Hell, Satan finds himself in the company of the other fallen angels who express a litany of emotions; doubt, fear, anxiety, and anger. They console and contest each other. The figure of Satan becomes relatable to the reader because he is able to interact with these other vo...

Prolegomena to the Luciferian Archetype and Myth There is no point in trying to write about anything related to the Devil as if it can be disinterestedly. The subject never fails to elicit certain reactions. As such, we may address the two most common of those reactions head-on with the further caveat that we are not interested in propagating either. The first is fairly well known. It is the kind of thought-process that also would see a ban on everything from Halloween to Charles Darwin. A bit like how normally solitary animals have a way of finding each other over long distances, nothing draws a particular type of Christian fundamentalist out quite like the suggestion that somebody is considering the myth of Satan with anything other than gut-wrenching revulsion. This creates an obstruction to deeper introspection that is not only wrong, but also increasingly futile in our own times. The second type of reaction is more modern, but less recognized. While many people have simply...

AlejandroJodorowsky’s film The Holy Mountain follows the journey of a Christ-like character known only as ‘The Thief’ as he comes under the tutelage of a Master Alchemist. His goal is to achieve a spiritual transmutation, or enlightenment, by seeking out the Holy Mountain. The Thief is accompanied by seven companions who travel with him through a series of spiritual revelations. Towards the end of the film, the group comes to a place called Lotus Island. There they are approached by a host who offers congratulations on a successful journey and invites them to join him at The Pantheon Bar where a raucous party is underway. The Host explains that this is where the spiritual masters gather to celebrate their achievements. The group is given a sampling of the party’s attendants. The group is first brought to an orator, who explains that enlightenment resides in his speech. He claims that his poems may manifest flowers and the bees would then come to suckle at his living poetry. But...

In a futuristic metropolis, calculated floods are used to build a sense of community in a yuppie neighborhood, but not all residents feel the same about it. (PDF) Available Here

“But Plato's greatness as a sociologist does not lie in his general and abstract speculations about the law of social decay. It lies rather in the wealth and detail of his observations, and in the amazing acuteness of his sociological, intuition. He saw things which not only had not been seen before him, but which were rediscovered only in our own time … Another example is Plato's sociological and economic historicism, his emphasis on the economic background of political life and historical developments; a theory revived by Marx under the name 'historical materialism'.” -Karl Popper, “The Open Society and It’s Enemies: Vol I, The Spell of Plato Was it really not until Marx that this idea was ‘rediscovered’? Compare Popper’s statement to the following excerpt from De Regimine Principum of Saint Thomas Aquinas , “Again, if the citizens devote their lives to trade, the way will be opened to many vices. For, since the aim of traders is especially to make money, ...

There is in every enduring spiritual legacy, an emphasis on ascetic practice. Why this occurs has been subject to much investigation. And while the investigations themselves may interesting, no single study will sufficiently describe all aspects of asceticism. Nor should we expect one to. For practical purposes, as it is experienced, the subject must be considered on a number of different planes. We will limit ourselves to three examples, along with some further considerations on the subject. A Final Break with Attachment Defined as the act of breaking an attachment, this view of asceticism may be the easiest to understand as that it can be easily translated into terms that require no consideration of its more transcendent features. Although a ‘break’ with some aspect of the material world often is often done in order to look beyond, this need not always be the case. The motivation can be more secular. Many students know well the feeling of what was intended to be five-minute ...